The emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in the enterprise enables data to be accessed as a bundle of resources available through services rather than a bound together as a monolithic transaction or application. When implementing user interfaces on SOA platforms, the data services provided by the platform are composed into data displays tailored to a specific usage context. To develop usable data displays with appropriate content and user interaction, the developer has to have expertise not only in front end design, but also in accessing and composing low level services exposed by ERP platforms. However, the access and display of data content occurs through multiple different channels or devices, each of which may render the data content differently. Each device or application has traditionally been developed separately, where each access to data is defined specifically in relation to the device or UI technology in which the data is presented. Presenting the data in a different application or different device generally allows only minimal reuse of code and the mapping of services into consumable data presentations has to be redone within every new target consumer technology (device and/or UI technology).
MVC (model-view-controller) architectures are commonly used, ostensibly for separating the modeling of the data, from the logic to control data flow, from the display or presentation of the data. However, in reality the layers are actually dependent on one another in current implementations because the MVC pattern is associated with one specific UI component residing in one specific technical stack, which reduces portability between different UI technologies, local MVC stacks do not support developmental reuse across user interfaces and devices.
Additionally, the service composition tools to build UIs are generally focused on design times defining UIs fixed in content and functionality based on what was perceived as desirable functionality at the time of designing the UI. The ability to customize the resulting packaged UI to a specific context of use has been impractical, and the user interface cannot be transformed to devices that require a structurally different native user experience. Thus, the content and the representation of data which are created with large investment and a great deal of expertise are not consumable other than on one specific target platform.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.